Thoughts on life, God and faith from a local church minister and teacher

Friday, August 17, 2012

To Cheat or Not to Cheat?

“I would prefer even
to fail with honor than win by cheating.”--Sophocles

It is a five letter word which, when played in this most
familiar of American board games, is worth ten points. That’s assuming the
tiles are not placed on any bonus squares. The game is Scrabble, and I confess
I am a Scrabble aficionado, a geek, a fan, and lifelong enthusiastic player. If Scrabble were an Olympic event I’d have
dreams of winning a gold medal. I’ve loved Scrabble since our family first
played it around the dining room table, perhaps on a rainy summer vacation day
or a post holiday afternoon, when we were looking for something fun and
challenging to do together as a clan.

Scrabble is truly old school, retro, first invented in 1938.
The elements of the game are basic. A board marked by a 15 by 15 grid.
Ninety-eight wooden tiles, each affixed with a letter from the alphabet and
point value, save for two which are blank.Then all you need to play are a pencil, a score sheet, a dictionary and
curiosity about language.It is wildly
popular. Scrabble is sold in 129 countries in 29 different languages. Millions
play online Scrabble or variations of the game every day. 150 million games
have been sold and it is estimated that one third of all American households
own it. Your copy is probably tucked
away on a closet shelf or dusty bookcase or at the cabin or cottage, just
waiting to be unpacked and played again.

Oh and that five letter word? C-H-E-A-T.For last week the Scrabble universe was
rocked by its first major cheating scandal, which happened at the National
Scrabble Championships in Orlando,
Florida. OK, maybe “rocked” is
too dramatic a word, though if you played that, it’s worth 13 points. But I
digress. (9 points and even better, seven letters…sorry, can’t help it!)

The cheating happened in one of the tournament’s final
rounds when a player, setting up for a new game, surreptitiously placed two blank
tiles on the floor beneath his seat. Blanks are like gold to a Scrabble player.
They can be used anywhere on the board to make or complete a word.An opponent saw the cheater’s duplicitous
deceit, called over a judicious judge and the wayward word thief fessed up to
his feckless fraud and was summarily suspended. (To love Scrabble you gotta love words!)

I guess I’m not surprised that cheating has now infected the
Scrabble community.It does seem that
wherever in the world competition happens, or a prize or honor is at stake, or when
we humans imagine no one else is looking, we cheat.

On the same day as Scrabble-gate, Melky Cabrera, the leading
hitter in Major League Baseball’s National League, was suspended for 50 games
for cheating, taking testosterone to enhance his skills.The Internal Revenue Service routinely loses
a big chunk of its tax collections to tax cheats, most often from folks who
under-report (lie) about their income. $385 billion dollars was lost in 2006,
the most recent year for when data was available. Companies cheat too. In
the last year the Securities and Exchange Commission collected a $285 million
settlement from Citi Group, owner of Citi Bank, the nation’s third largest bank, for
betting against investments it had cheerfully recommended to its own customers.
Goldman Sachs was caught doing the same shell game and paid the largest
securities settlement in U.S.
history, $550 million.

Cheating. You can try to dress it up in an expensive suit
and drive it away in a limo, spin it with lawyerly words or rationalizations, but
still its deception.Doesn’t matter
whether we “just” hid a Scrabble tile, or juiced to get more hits, or fudged
the bottom line on our taxes or committed fraud against trusting customers.
It’s rigging the game.Hiding a card up
your sleeve.Stacking the deck. Deceiving
another. Breaking the law. Breaking a moral code. Breaking God’s law. Lying.

So here’s an alternative word, both for the game of Scrabble
and the game of life:

H-O-N-E-S-T-Y. Play
it right and you’ll score at least 13 points and also have the gift of knowing
that when it came time to compete and to play, it was a fair game all around. Then
the best person wins.Trust wins.
Integrity wins and claims the champion’s crown.